Many individuals with significant hearing loss are not able to communicate effectively over conventional telephone systems that rely upon voice communications. Since the early 1960s, devices have been available for facilitating the communication between hearing and hearing-impaired users.
The hearing-impaired user would utilize a teletypewriter (TTY) to communicate over the telephone lines. Such devices, known as Telephone Devices for the Deaf (TDDs) are configured to allow a hearing-impaired user to type a message on a keyboard that is then sent to the receiving user. Upon receipt of the coded signal, the signal is decoded and displayed on a message terminal. The receiving party may thereafter respond using a similar procedure. It should be apparent that such a communication approach is slow and cumbersome. Standardized methodologies have been developed for enabling a hearing-impaired user equipped with a TDD to communicate telephonically with normal hearing individuals not equipped with an equivalent device. To provide such a capability, relay services have been established and staffed with interpreters equipped to receive phone calls from either the hearing-impaired user as initiated using a TDD or from a hearing-capable user using conventional voice telephony. The relay interpreter's function is to establish a communication session between the calling and called parties and to thereafter serve as an interpreter between the users. In a typical conversation utilizing the relay services, the hearing-impaired user enters keystrokes, which in turn send a message to the relay services interpreter who then voices the received text-based message to the hearing party over a voice-based communication channel. A hearing-capable user thereupon may voice a response to the relay services interpreter who in turn enters keystrokes that form a text-based message, which is delivered to the hearing-impaired user and presented on the TDD device. Such a process continues for the duration of the conversation or communication session.
While TDD devices facilitate communication with at least one hearing-impaired user, they are limited in fulfilling various needs of hearing-impaired users and more particularly in providing communication options for hearing-impaired individuals having varying degrees of impairment. For example, a hearing-impaired individual, while being impaired as to the hearing or receiving of audio signals, may in fact be capable of generating voice communication that is adequately intelligible so as to be comprehended by a hearing-capable party. In fact a significant number of hearing-impaired individuals have the ability to intelligibly speak but their hearing is inadequate for conventional communications over voice telephony. For efficiency, as well as other reasons, such speech-capable hearing-impaired individuals regularly desire to converse using voice-based responses.
Video phone communication systems provide visual and audio communication between two or more users during a communication session. A video phone camera at a first location can transmit and receive audio and video signals to and from a video phone camera at a second location such that participants at the first location are perceived to be present or face-to-face with participants at a second location and vice versa.
Video phone communication systems span a variety of applications. One possible application of a video phone system includes facilitization of a communication session with a deaf or hearing-impaired user. A hearing-impaired user can use a video phone during a communication session to relay his or her expressions. The expressions, such as sign language and/or body language, may be interpreted or translated by a translation service such as a video relay service (VRS). The translation service provides a hearing-capable translator who relays the expressions of the hearing-impaired caller to a hearing-capable user on the other end of the communication session in a conventional manner, such as through the use of a voice-based dialogue conveyed over a conventional voice phone.
A hearing-impaired user may have a need to communicate with a hearing-capable user that speaks a language different from the standard language spoken by translators at the VRS. In such cases, conventional VRS systems have a translator answer a call from a hearing-capable user in the standard language. If the translator does not handle calls in the spoken language of the hearing-capable user, the translator must then reroute the call to another translator that can handle the spoken language of the hearing-capable user.
Therefore, in order to provide increased efficiency for users of a VRS, there is a need for improving efficiencies during the setup time of a call from hearing-capable users using different spoken languages.